‘Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!’ is a film that filled me to the brim. It is the kind of film that I will recall and savour, flaws and all. The pacing is languorous, and in the second-half, the stutters become obvious. Its biggest weakness is its leading man Sushant Singh Rajput…

Maybe the intention of the film was to tell us that ladies who dance for a living also have the right to respectability, which is wonderful, but a mothballed plot and an even more mothballed treatment isn’t the way forward.

‘Hunterrr’ is about a guy who can’t keep it in his pants…And what does it say about Indian society that men can be out-there hunters, and women have to be content to be under-the-radar prey? When will Bollywood give us a film in which men and women are equal opportunity offenders? Can it ever?

It’s not that Sharma, who has also produced the film, is not trying hard. She is, and up to a point, she is in fine fettle. But at the point when she turns from flee to fight, I stopped believing.

What we get is the kind of film which should have been deep-sixed before it was thought of. And dialogues that had me guffawing helplessly because there was nothing else I could do.

This kind of film can work if it has a new spin on an old story. But the cop who gets busy notching up kills, without making us wonder about the morality of someone taking it upon themselves to exterminate humans, is a cipher. So is the film. And the worst part? It’s full of blips, everyone’s lips going silent, as soon as, presumably, a cussword comes along.
Oh our delicate ears.

The first thing you should know about ‘Dum Laga Ke Haisha’ is that it has a story. Verily, the thing that movies ought to have before they get made, the very thing that Bollywood forgets, unbelievably, so often. The story is the basis of a solid, honest-to-goodness script, a lead couple that wins you over gradually but surely, and a bunch of actors who know exactly where they are at.

‘Badlapur’ takes a stab at an underlying theme which runs parallel to the revenge motif: can forgiveness, even for the most heinous of crimes, come with time; and, as a corollary, what, after all, is revenge? But the film doesn’t explore these fundamental questions with the kind of depth it could have. What is left is a bunch of jugular-grabbing explosive scenes, which make you sigh for the film this could have been. It should have left us scorched; it doesn’t​. For me, ‘Johnny Gaddar’ is still the film Raghavan has to scale.

‘Qissa’ is lambent, lovely, and completely seductive up till this point. It then tumbles into another zone, where an accident leads to a death, and the appearance of a ‘ghost’, and the tale stutters.

The ‘film’ is excruciatingly awful only for non-believers…